NC State lost 35-59 to #21 Clemson on the road today. Below is the transcript from Wolfpack Head Coach Dave Doeren’s Postgame Press Conference.

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I’m proud of CJ (Bailey) for one, I thought he prepared well for the game. He did some good things, he came out, I don’t have the exact number, but I think he was seven of eight or something to start the game, did some good things. Obviously, when you’re turning the football over three times, it’s not good.

I don’t think I’ve ever won a game when we’ve been minus three in turnover margin. But CJ’s not to blame for the loss, I can tell you that. He did some good things, and that’s a tough environment for a first start.

He was not intimidated one bit, he had good energy, good spirit. When he made a mistake, he stayed the same way as he did when he made a play, and he’s gonna grow a lot from that game. Lex (Thomas) came in, did some good things at the end, and that’s it.

I’m not gonna talk about the rest of it, because I don’t have any new information on the other part of it.

What did you see on defense?

Explosive plays, guys not fitting the run properly, not tackling well, playing soft in coverage, just not aggressive. It looked like we were on our heels, I’m not sure why. Obviously, they had a bye week, they had some new things, but we didn’t use the rules of our system well.

And so we gotta be better than that, that’s not who we are on defense. I know Coach Gibson’s sick to his stomach right now about it, and the film’s gonna tell us a lot, it is.

Playing tough, is that a mindset?

Yeah, it’s a mindset, and we’ve done that.

This year, we’ve played tough defense at times, and obviously, we’ve given up some big plays. And we’ve played two really good offenses, we haven’t played well enough. In the first half, and both of them was killers.

I mean, you give up explosive plays, you get behind like we did against a team like that in their stadium, it’s not gonna turn out well. And so there’s eight games left in the regular season. I know that our staff will do a good job of looking at our personnel and looking at our schemes, and get back to work.

I mean, we continued to fight in this game. I was happy with how we did that. Obviously, they didn’t challenge us a lot with their offense in the second half.

But our offense got things going. They ran the football well, they threw the ball around a little bit. You gotta see some young players get some really valuable time.

We had to move a lot of pieces on the O line, and I thought those guys performed well. And that’s a lot to ask. You move your right guard to right tackle, your right tackle to left tackle, and you bring your back up right guard in the game.

And you play better than we did in the first half. So I’m proud of those guys up front for that. But yeah, there’s not much else to say.

Anything you want to add to this game?

I mean, you get behind early in both of them for different reasons. We were in the Tennessee game going into half, and the Pick Six just flipped the complexion of that one. We weren’t in this game.

I mean, they jumped out on us fast in the first quarter. So different games, and I thought we learned a lot coming out of Tennessee. We got a lot more physical, I thought, in the Louisiana Tech game.

Did a lot of good things, held the team to 33 yards rushing. And obviously, that didn’t translate to this week. And so without watching the film, guys, I can’t give you 100% on what we gotta work on, but there’s a lot.

And one thing about this staff is we’ll work on it. We’ll get better.

I know you’re not happy with the outcome, but you’re not panicking. Is that a result of just being in this sport?

It’s a long season. It’s a long season, and people wrote us off last year, 4-3. And we ended up winning nine games and had a good season.

And so I told them, we got eight games. We got a lot to do, a lot to play for. There’s a lot in front of us.

And we’re gonna find out. We’re gonna find out who wants to fight, who wants to get in there. And that’s what happened last year.

The guys kind of said no mas, and a bunch of guys stepped up and we started playing better. So this will be another truth serum when you get in the film room tomorrow. It’s gonna be a tough Sunday for them.

Did captains step up?

Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know that I did, to be honest. I never saw a big play made by somebody in that role.

Obviously, Grayson didn’t play. So it wasn’t a game where there was a guy I can single out, and say ‘He had a great game today.’

We didn’t have a guy like that today. We just didn’t. So give Clemson credit, they outplayed us today.

And when that happens, they out-coach us, right? So like I’ve always said, it starts and ends with me, and we gotta get better. And no, we’re not gonna panic. We’re two and two.

There’s a lot of football left in this season. We do have some good players, and we need to get back to playing better.

What was your reaction to Anthony Belton getting ejected for spitting on a player?

Disappointed in him.

I didn’t see what happened prior. He said the guys spit on him first, and he spit back at him. Our guys know when you retaliate, you’re the one that gets the flag.

I don’t know if that happened or didn’t happen. And it really doesn’t matter if it did. We can’t respond that way.

We have to respond as mature adults, walk away from the situation, tell the head coach this happened, let me tell the ref, and then get the guy later in the game for something. So Anthony was disappointed in himself. Obviously, I was disappointed in him.

He’ll learn a lot from that. But that’s not him, and that was a bad response on his part. One more.

There were some mis-fits early on. Were you surprised by that?

Yeah, very surprised.

For a team that’s been top three in rushing defense for three years in a row, misfit a bunch of, it wasn’t like they put in a bunch of crazy run game. I mean, the quarterback counter out empty was a good play design by them. Other than that, it was plays we’ve seen.

We gotta get off the blocks.